Inhalt und Struktur der Datenbank "Wahl- und Sozialdaten der Kreise und Gemeinden des Deutschen Reiches von 1920 bis 1933"

This article describes the content of a very large historical data bank about the Weimar Republic and the principles of data-management, analogous to the hierarchical systematic structure of its underlying statistical sources. The subjects of the data bank are the Kreise (counties) and Gemeinden (communities) with their electoral results of eight Reichstagswahlen and census data about social occupation structure, confession and unemployment in the period between 1920 and 1933. Some important problems would appear, when using this cross-sectional organized aggregate data set for longitudinal purposes. The solutions of this problems base upon several strategies in conjunction with special code variables, established by the author into the data bank. They produce new longitudinal data sets with relative stable geographic units. Further, this article gives a short view about the variables and technical aspects of data-handling. The historical data bank and a user manual is now public for social and historical scientists and available via the Center for Historical Social Research in Cologne/FRG